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Image Credits: Title Image by padfield.com. Interior Map and all other photographs by Eduardo. Divider licensed for use in publishing from Photoshopgraphics.com ~Sephrena.

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War should never be about revenge.

On the other hand a real war, not some little intervention to keep the peace, should never be about moral issues either.

If we wanted to attack every city state that has a bad policy towards women, we would be in constant war and this would demand such sacrifices that we would not do our most important job.

Live happily and help to bring others to our cause.

The exception was our attack on Last Fall, but this war was both for commercial reasons and to gain new members to our tribe.

It was not really revenge.

Or, at least, I like to think that it was not.

Anora the First
Philosophical musings.
 

 
Anora`s Diary

I still can`t believe that I was voted for commander of our tribe against Last Fall. The whole election took one night at the spiritual plane, in the Goddess cavern where memories were shared and nobody could lie. Being elected by the collective mind of all my sisters as the creative mind behind what is to happen put a very heavy burden in my shoulders.

Weirdest of all was that, despite being voted in such a mind blowing way, I still had to face a very human reaction of my sisters when I told that the best thing to do first was peace and commerce. Some got really mad at me and, in our little word of no deception, their thoughts burned my mind for two or three days until the Goddess interfered with one simple sentence: “YOU CHOSE, NOW OBEY”. Well, a simple sentence uttered in such a way that it gave headaches to my sisters for one day and reminded us that I will plan and decide a strategy, but who really rules is there watching and judging. Of course, the Goddess certainly could control this all by herself with no resistance. I wonder if she is not getting too much fun out of this game.

My plan was simple: first attack any caravan with slaves but leave all the others alone. We even helped a few caravans in trouble against huge predators. Oh, and we let the people that quit the caravans while leaving the slaves to us survive. We watched their groups but didn`t interfere and allowed them to reach their destination, being it Last Fall, New Rome or anywhere else. We needed a reputation of accepting surrender or else we would be fighting too many fights to the death.

Also, well... I started a commercial war.
 

 
Village of Resistance one week after Erynia escaped Thebes

Former boat captain Jean Cloutou was drunk. No, not only drunk, completely, totally irrevocably piss poor drunk. As he left the bar where the bartender had been quite sympathetic, as were all the other boat captains, the only thoughts on his foggy mind were about the last fight he had with his wife and how long it would take for him to be eaten by something when he jumped into the river. His wife simply did not understand it. She had been right when she told him to carry Icari fruits and not slaves in his new boat, the boat that he had worked so hard to buy, perhaps some of that Jewish dead God drivel of hers was even true and slavery was punished by the Gods, but now it was too late. He had put his last coin into that boat and the ghost women had taken it. The husk that had been found weeks later in a side channel of the river had been completely depredated by the local peasants or even by the same sympathetic captains that had paid his tab at the bar but would not give him a job. Nobody hired a man that had lost a ship.

As he walked to the water he imagined how his wife would fare. Better than with him, he supposed. She had a daughter, but was still young and pretty. Many of his fellows would be by her house in two days, as soon as he was considered missing, commiserating on the “accidental” loss of her husband and offering a shoulder to cry upon.

She was smart enough to know that the alternative was the bordello, and many of his fellows would want a woman that came with a nice house and a husk of a boat that could still be repaired with enough money. The daughter was a minor inconvenience, but she could be married in a few years and still bring good connections.

The worst was that he loved his wife, he simply could not see an alternative. Well, at least for him it should be fast, the needle fish had been hunting in this area of the river again, if he fell into the water they would be making holes in his skin and eating his innards in minutes. Better to be eaten by them than by the gigantic crocodile whose body had been found yesterday at the port, full of holes.

He was in this dark mood, praying to whatever god that was listening that his death would be fast and that the drink would reduce the worst of the pain when he reached the dark riverside road in that full moon night. And found himself surrounded by tall women wearing pieces of leather and cloth that covered only their breasts and their crotch, apparently more for support and comfort than modesty.

“Came to finish the job, you whores?” He slurred. “Come, see if a drunk man can put up a fight.” He raised his fists and lunged at the nearest woman only to fall down at his first step. There he remained, crying of the dirty mud. “Come on then, kill me! Better you than the needle fish.”

One of the women, actually a girl of perhaps fifteen years of age, approached him. Her beautiful face was a mix of piety and revulsion. “Jean Cloutou, we are not here to kill you.” Then she dropped a bag at his side.

Still crouching Jean went to the bag and found it full of blue stones. There was a fortune in gems and stones that could be enchanted. While he looked at it dumbfounded, the girl continued to speak: “You were making a profit from the suffering of others, but we forgive you. Take this, pay your debts, fix your boat and come to the Dromenicus channel at noon two days from now with a crew of three trusted men. We have a cargo and a job for you.” And they disappeared in the darkness.

This time he took advice with his wife, so, instead of going right away to the harbor to pay in stones to fix his new boat he went to the local money lender and made a deal. He exchanged a few of the most common stones for money and gave a few others as “collateral to a loan.” The deal included a non disclosure clause with severe penalties if anyone learned that the loan was, for all practical purposes, already paid and that magical stones had been used to pay it.

By the middle of the next day, the whole town was gossiping how “broken Jean” convinced a stupid money lender to pay for the repair of his boat when everybody knew that if Jean risked transporting slaves, he would need more than five years to pay the debt, notwithstanding the interest rates.

Jean, of course, was at the appointed place in the right time. There he received a cargo of rare stones and a list of things to buy with them. He also got a letter of introduction to house Meridien, a Greco house famous for its competition with house Melbur. Together with the letter came a few enchanted stones, including one to speak at a distance. There was also a treaty of commerce to be offered to this influent house. The treaty gave them exclusive rights of commerce of certain kinds of stones that would be mined in the next ten years, in exchange for stopping any dealings with slavers and not using the city of Last Fall in their trade routes. It also established a fee and a set of rules to follow for safe passage through the grasslands. Jean was named as the only person responsible for carrying the cargo between Resistance and Thebes for the time being. The Tribe of the Mountains as they named themselves in the treaty would not accept anyone else appearing in the delivery point for the next five years.

Jean had not bought a boat by being stupid, he understood clearly that the Ghost Women or Tribe of the Mountains, or whatever, were considered enemies of Thebes and, in the unlikely circumstance that pride won over greed, Meridien house would “interrogate” him and send him to the authorities. So, he did something unusual - he told everything to his wife and left her a lump sum to try to run with, just in case. He also used well the two weeks before his boat was ready, hiring a mage and a fighter to protect his home and family and also two mercenaries for his boat.

He didn`t have to worry, as soon as the representative of house Meridien at the docks read his letter and the proposed treaty Jean was sent directly to talk to Marcus Meridien himself and Marcus, after hearing his tale, gave a hearty laugh, signed the treaty and even sent some of his own guards to protect his new partner`s boat in the way upriver. After all, one of the signatures in the treaty was from Erynia Melbur. The irony alone was too delicious for the fat and joyful Greco merchant to resist.
 

 
Anora`s Diary

Some merchant houses are a bit too proud for their own good, after losing almost all the slaver caravans of the year, what they do? Send another caravan, with more slaves but protected by the best that the money can buy. A test, of course, to see how strong we were. And, in a sense, it worked because it forced us to use our most efficient weapon.

In the grasslands between Last Fall and New Rome

A female eagle spies as a large caravan threads slowly through the commercial route in a scorching sunny day. Something inside the birds teaches her to count and she would be surprised by the numbers, if her little brain allowed her to conjecture. Passing bellow her there are five red tinted cage wagons, the cages made with thick bars of ironwood reinforced with kinetic stones here and there. Following them there are six heavy large wagons probably full of food, but also weapons and a few warriors. Two armored wagons carried by dranacks and full of heat mages were also amidst this caravan: one in the front, another at the rear. Amongst the wagons were a large number of mules and horses bringing both provisions and well armored soldiers. This was escorted by ten full knights of Vanis, whose armor shone with a myriad of magical stones and is more expensive than a small barony. The eagle does its count and leaves. The force inside her is satisfied and now she can feed. In the caravan though, red stones flare with brilliance detecting the intrusion of an ancient enemy. But nobody cares anymore, these same stones have been flashing almost continuously since they left Last Fall pointing at enemies everywhere; from the scattered bushes to the land where they walk.

Lost, too, amongst this crowd of travelers and ignoring the repeated warnings as everybody else is doing, is Elmorier,the elf. He is perhaps the only elf to have ventured south this year and was asking himself for the umpteenth time why he accepted this job. True, human slavery is nothing to the elf, but it is not something to die for either. The payment, although good, simply did not justify the risk involved.

Besides, even when carrying slaves, a person must feel that their job will be somehow productive or, at least, that there is sense to the whole enterprise. But, as the elf knows very well, the slaves will not be allowed to leave the wagons during the one month trip, and will get to New Rome sick, debilitated and smelling really bad. Also, the small children will probably die, some together with their mothers. This cargo will lose more than half its value before arriving at its destination.

While the cargo will needlessly be tortured and weakened by the trip, the caravan is certainly the most expensive enterprise ever supported by the cities of Vanis and Thebes.

Protected by mages, knights, two groups of adventurers (including his), a large militia, and at least three extra magical martial artists that the elf can identify full of magical stones, this caravan was costing, in wages alone, at least thrice the value of the cargo.

All of this was to supply an empire that could get cheaper, better trained, and docile slaves within its own cities. They did so through slavery by debt or by getting wilder slaves in one of its interminable wars with “the barbarians” both northeast at the dark forest and northwest at the island of Albion.

Despite all these sound commercial reasons and the fact that no caravan that had not carried slaves had been attacked here they were. Probably just to prove that a few merchant houses in Thebes and the king of Vanis could do what they please or to show to the people of these powerful cities that the now infamous phantom women can be defeated.

Hah! But to defeat someone, first you must first find them. And even the ex-tribe scouts of the caravan were having trouble finding their enemies. Despite the constant warnings given by the red gems Elmorier could even believe that this caravan would not be attacked, if not for the missing scouts.

A large group had left this morning to check the land as far as the pond where they would stop this night and should have returned by now. This scout group had not been weak, they had a communication stone, one body mage and five ex tribe warriors, but no message came and no sign of the group was found. It was as if the land itself had swallowed them, but everybody knew that this happened only in the eastern continent so, something even more terrible must have happened.

Now the remaining scouts where afraid to venture away from the main body and were talking about revenge of the dead and pit spawned beasts. Despite this and a growing feeling of unease the caravan went on. The pond was essential to replenish their water supplies.

When they got to the little cluster of trees around the pond they were surprised to see no sign of a fight. It was peaceful and undisturbed. There was no sign of human presence, not even of the caravan that they knew had passed this way only five days ago going to Resistance and that had passed by them in the road.

While some of the warriors went to see what had hidden in the water (only a gigantic alligator, easily killed, a nice surprise since in the last pond it had been a large dinosaur). The rest of the caravan hastened to create a defensive perimeter, they dug a rectangular trench and altered the mage`s wagons to serve as defensive towers at the corners of the new fort. Then Elmoriel and many others took the first watch as one third of the caravan went to a restless sleep.

And many hours passed.

No noise, no animal noise, not even a mosquito. Nothing, the night was too quiet. It was the end of the dry season and, even with the relative abundance of water in the grasslands, a pond like the one close to camp should attract a lot of animal life, but here they were and nothing moved.

The feeling of unease kept growing. The waiting was getting unbearable. So, it was almost with a feeling of relief that, near the end of his shift, the elf spotted a shadow moving close to the ground a little bit off the camp. He took his bow to shoot, placing an arrow with the swiftness typical of his race, but was surprised by arrows coming from all directions, including above. He counted fifty arrows launched against the guards of the camp, two against him. His armor held, but three of his four kinetic stones went dead. At a glance the experienced adventurer knew that these stones were burned and would not be rechargeable.

Mad with the loss of the expensive stones the mercenary elf searched the shadows for anything that he could shoot, but even his eyes could only see indistinct shapes moving away from the caravan. He shot one of them anyway and got a satisfying yelp of pain followed by some fire as the heat stone imbibed at the tip of the arrow did its job. After this the shadows moving close to ground disappeared quite fast and the rest of the night was quiet. Well, quiet after they burned the bodies of the fallen before they could be controlled by the dark tendrils that sprang from the enemy arrow tips. In the end, one fire mage and ten soldiers had been killed, a minor loss for a caravan like this but put together with the loss of the scouts it hurt.

All was quiet again for a while, but nobody slept. Finally, when the moon had perhaps traveled another quarter of the sky the commandant of the security forces of the caravan did his last round of the camp, intending to send some of the soldiers and mages to sleep. When he got close to the enclosure where their cattle and some of the horses were kept he noticed that the animals were acting weirdly. They seemed to be moving with purpose, with the aurocks getting in position close to the improvised fence.

Being a veteran from many fights, some against non human enemies, the commandant considered best to exaggerate than to be surprised, so, he called a group of soldiers ordering them to stay behind with arrows notched to bows and sent a group of three body mages to check the animals. He also forewarned a group of heat mages from one of the “towers” at the side of the camp.

A soon as the mages approached, the animals broke their bonds and the enclosure, attacking the camp in a stampede of hooves and horns. They were fast decimated by heat from above and arrows from the guards, but one aurock managed to kill one of the body mages while the remaining had the charges of the stones in their armor severely depleted. The armor could be recharged, even by the body mages themselves, but it would take time and energy. In the end, these mages got very little sleep. Now the caravan didn`t have horses and aurocks enough to lift camp.

For all practical purposes they were already defeated. The merchants had to choose to kill the slaves, try to bring the slaves on foot to the market with the rainy season approaching or leave the slaves to the ghost women, take whatever they could salvage and leave. To complicate matters, a flock of birds flew over the camp a few hours before noon and dropped pieces of parchment. These were letters detailing in graphical terms what would happen next night if the slaves were killed.

The next morning was bright, with the sun shining in a blue sky with only a hint of the rains that were to come in the next fortnight. Despite the beautiful sunrise there was plenty of tension in the camp, with heated discussions being heard from the tent of the merchants that ruled the caravan. Besides, some of the humans of the caravan were complaining of headaches and a minor itch at their chests while others were a bit over emotional, complaining about their lost comrades and even crying. The slaves observed all this from their stinking cages with stoicism and more than a little bit of apathy. One of the small children had died last night, amid the putrid conditions in the cage wagons.

By the middle of the morning, one of the younger heat mages went to the dung trenches to pee and gave a strangled cry. He was not the only one, the body mage that was serving the caravan as a doctor soon received many men complaining that their “equipment” had reduced in size and they could see little breasts in their chests. Many men were feeling their strength diminish by now and some were afraid to lose their manhood altogether. Words about curse and becoming phantom women themselves could be heard thorough camp.

The elf was untouched by the changes, but Elmorier had not lived so long ignoring the basic facts of life. He took his horse, which fortunately had been tied close to his tent and away from the other beasts, called his comrades, gave back a refund of their wages to the merchants and left the camp. By the end of the morning the martial artists and almost all of the normal humans had done the same together with most merchants, all which were not so encumbered by debts that they didn`t believe in their ability to restart somewhere.

Besides the few helpless merchants, the knights, the most desperate of the mages and the ex tribesmen remained. This last group only because they knew that they would get no mercy from what they took to be the ghosts of their former comrades. The ex tribesmen chanted their death chant, asked forgiveness to their war god and waited with the eyes of people that knew that they were already dead, while watching with detached amusement the movement of the knights and remaining mages as the changes progressed, their breasts grew while their muscles atrophied and their voices changed to softer tones.

As soon as they found themselves ruling the camp, the knights surrounded the slave wagons. They wanted to kill the slaves, but the same measures taken to avoid an escape were now against them. The bars of the cages could not be broken, arrows shot from outside would be stopped by the kinetic stones imbibed in the wagons and the doors of the cages were small, allowing only one man to pass at a time. The brave companions, as they called themselves, decided that sending armored men to fight at the door to kill debilitated women and children one at a time was too dangerous. Instead, they decided to open the doors and promise on their honor as knights that the slaves would be freed. After all, promises made to peasants and lesser beings were not valid.

The slaves, though, perhaps too debilitated, perhaps a bit smarter after days of close confinement listening to the banter of the knights about sub human races and: “my peasants simply can`t understand that they are not people.”; refused to leave the relative safety of the cages.

While the captain of the ten knights tried to convince the slaves to get out to be slaughtered, a task made difficult because he was already in emotional turmoil just by being forced to speak with sub humans as if they were people at the same time that his new breasts felt uncomfortable under his armor, hundreds of beasts were slowly crawling in the grass, surrounding the camp.

The ex tribesmen were the first to spot the gigantic wolves hidden in the grass, as soon as they gave warning, though, not only wolves but also raptors and shadow cats emerged from all around. The next wave were birds and pterodactyls that took flight nearby and attacked from above, followed by one hundred women mounted in huge war horses and using long ranged compound bows.

The knights survived only while their kinetic stones lasted. Eventually, the stones in their armor started to lose their magical charge and the terrified men inside could see one stone after the other lose its brightness until the last charge was spent and a gigantic jaw or an arrow finished their lives.

Even the remaining body mage didn`t fare better, he was soon surrounded by a ring of mounted riders, shooting arrow with uncanny accuracy while avoiding his attacks. Hit and run tactics wore him down until his armor started to fail and his regenerative ability was overwhelmed.

Soon there were only the slaves, most of them showing the effects of the strong chemicals that had been dropped in the water of the nearby pond. The men were weakened, showing breasts and small penises while the women were feeling stronger and more confident with firmer breasts and better health.

Most of the slaves accepted to join the Tribe, the males that refused were given money and horses. The effects of the chemicals dissipated in a few days, the Tribe would never use the act of being turned into a woman as punishment, only those that asked for it and were found deserving were turned into y girls.

The new members of the Tribe of the Mountains desired blood. The mothers that had lost babies were almost mad with rage and they demanded to be in the front lines against Last Fall.
 

 
Anora`s Diary - Continued

We contacted other houses, besides Meridien and offered deals in other products besides stones. My favorite is an elixir that allows women to get a bit stronger without making them look masculine. But we are expanding our line, including beauty products, birth control drugs and things for “that time of the month”. We will work through intermediaries for now, but there is one condition, anyone dealing with us does not work with slaves and do not pass through Last Fall.

We offered prices below market and let the merchants profit a lot over us. Not a big problem, since the contracts were for five, ten years at most. In ten years we would be free to do our own deals directly with the consumer and our products would be already known. What we needed was some breathing time, five to ten years in which we didn`t find an army in our doorstep, time to grow and multiply.

Unfortunately, the king of Vanis and Narsi was not so easy to persuade. The lands of his nobles had been systematically ransacked both by beasts and Tribes coming from the grasslands and it was considered important for them to keep an outpost in Last Fall to watch what was happening and avoid the rising of new “barbarian people”.

As the merchant houses of Thebes took their mercenaries from Last Fall, Vanis sent their troops to replace them. In the end, when the rains started to come Last Fall was protected by two hundred knights, three hundred archers from Narsi, one hundred ex tribesmen working for Urk and two hundred mercenaries, mostly from house Melbur. To face this we had four hundred warriors, mostly slaves that we had freed from caravans or covertly bought in the surrounding cities.

Oh, of course, we had the beasts, ranging from gigantic wolves to pterodactyls and they had the mages. A bloody battle would come out of this if we wanted to play fair in a frontal all out attack. But, really, do a frontal all out attack to lose at least a third of our warriors? Not even if we could convince all two hundred slaves still in Last Fall to join us. I never considered “playing fair” a part of any war.

Soon Last Fall was isolated from commerce by the rains. Rains that didn`t bother us in the least, since we had dug tunnels and caves with good draining systems in key spots of the terrain and hid food there. The Free People always loved the rainy season because of the fish in the lakes that seem to appear everywhere. Not a good weather for moving wagons, but excellent for fishing and not a complete disaster for our altered horses.

So, we had three months to torment Last Fall while it was practically isolated. The bad thing about this is that it was predictable, Urk and his men knew that the rains would not hamper us and they forced their slaves to clean the area around Last Fall of all vegetation and excavate the terrain creating a wall of earth and a pit around the settlement, this together with the internal wall made of ironwood logs created a good defense.

In the grasslands between Last Fall and New Rome.

But we still had some tricks. We had trained a group of young girls specialized in sneaking around, so that both walls were no big challenge to them and also, our people can feel the presence of life around us even through rain. In night and rain, the girls, cloaked in dark waterproof vests, could detect the guards of the settlement while the guards themselves had no way of seeing them. I sent our little group of spies and the girls got into the compound easily, carrying a group of mice taken by the goddess with them. Once inside, they released the mice. As the mice attacked the kitchens of many houses, including the barracks and Urk`s mansion, the girls hid as well as possible in shadows and rain. The houses in Last Fall were made of adobe or stone with tiled clay roofs. It would look like a quaint little village if not for the amount of armed men in its walls and the big sensala (big rectangular slave compound) that occupied a side of the place and stank a lot. The settlement was well illuminated by lamps placed on posts, while the outside area was covered with trip wires and traps to slow down enemies and warn of their approach. The girls had avoided the traps due to their training, but the next wave of the attack was not so subtle. As I felt that the girls were moving closer to the slaves I gave the order to open the caves that we had dug in a nearby hill and release our hungry captives. Gigantic scorpions had been preying on the lizard women controlled by the goddess for the past millennium. In the last two years we had learned to hunt them down in their caves, entrap them and even direct their movements with pheromones.

The goddess couldn`t take them since their immune system was adapted specifically to resist her, but she had learned and adapted with new knowledge taken from our brains and now was capable to at least direct their movements a little.

We simply released all gigantic scorpions that we had found in the mountains in the past year and left a trail of scents guiding them to Last Fall. After the scorpions were a bit away we released the three huge spiders that had been preying on the scorpions. They naturally followed their prey.

This is the kind of attack to which everyone is used. Gigantic beasts are often attacking human settlements and all warriors were trained in how to deal with them. Even through the rain the archers on the walls identified the threats as gigantic insects and started shooting fire arrows that did little damage but disoriented the beasts and lit the place allowing the mages in the four towers spread around the city to see better their enemy.

The mages send heat and big stones against the scorpions, generally making a scorpion fall in the direction of another. While even in the rain the spiders were effectively attacked by knights that were using reinforced armor and whose horses, besides being equally armored, had been trained to outmaneuver gigantic opponents while the kinights cut limbs with enchanted swords.

The battle proved to be glorious for the defenders, it took half the night but the warriors proved their valor killing dozens of gigantic insects while losing only one knight and one archer that had got to close to a spider to shoot it in the eyes. At the same time, the tribesmen inside the city hunted down the infected mice and saved most of the food stores. All in all, a nice demonstration of valor and bravery ruined only when, in the middle of the commemoration they noticed that the sensala had been opened and the slaves taken out of the city by a side door in the walls.

We also had dug trenches near the city while hidden by the ongoing fight. We had brought lizardwomen with us and they had been digging rock similar to the one bellow the soil of the grasslands for millennia. After releasing the slaves and digging our trenches, we left Last Fall in peace for a month. During this time we dealt with the escaped slaves.

The interesting part is that we could do what we did only because of Urk`s own evil. He had killed the old among the slaves and the children usually didn`t survive or became as strong in some ways as the adults. Urk ´s tendency to select the stronger and kill the weaker played in our favor in many ways. One day out of their prison and all slaves accepted to be converted in one of us, even if just for the pleasure of attacking Last Fall. Latter I learned that Elric Melbur had warned Urk of this possibility, but the ease with which he had betrayed and captured these slaves had blinded him for the fact that the Tribes were a warrior people. A true warrior adapts.

There were so many new converts at once that we had to create “conversion chambers”, twisted corridors with erotic drawings painted on the walls and full of smells and sights meant to slowly transform the perception of the males that walked into them. To complete that transformation, women that they trusted were placed at the end of the corridor, trained to masturbate at the right time and give to the former males the final pleasure that finishes the transformation. Yep, gender transformation in large scale, but with a much needed personal touch.

While our enemies were trapped inside walls our improved army was free to move. I must warm the reader, though, that moving too much in rain season is dangerous. The new lakes created by the rains are full of magical creatures eager for flesh and magic. We had more than a few sisters killed and eaten while trying to fish but we managed to avoid the worse lakes and to keep our front lines supplied.

Besides the mages, the knights were by far the best defenders left in Last Fall, this led to the creation of a strategy specifically made for them. First we kept some pressure, but using “unfair” methods like birds attacking from above or rats burrowing through their walls to try to reach their food. We made it impossible to sleep by sending shadow cats to attack the barracks at night or mice to gnaw at any piece of exposed flesh.

Finally there was a day without rain and we sent birds flying high above dropping messages. Among them there was a warning of what was to come and a proposal of a treaty to buy Icari fruits from Narses, if the knights left Last Fall right now. After this, we stopped. For seven days they waited in boredom for an attack that didn`t come. We could see them at the walls, getting slowly crazy, not knowing if we had quit, while our rats saw them sleeping poorly wondering what would happen next. They were stubborn, though, not sending even a messenger to Narses to see if their king would accept the offer.

So, we sent the girls to do surveillance and some mischief before our main attack.

This was a mistake.

It started well, the girls easily passed by the wall of earth in the middle of the mud and the rain. But when they were in the empty land between the two walls the earth opened under their feet swallowing two of our sisters despite their enhanced reflexes. One of the girls that had fallen into the pit was killed by stakes placed everywhere while the other fell in a kind of subterranean cell.

The other ten scouts found themselves under heavy fire from the mage towers and we lost two more girls as they retreated to one of our hidden tunnels outside the walls. While this happened our entrapped sister was sending images of her prison, a dark hole, full of stakes positioned to hamper her movements. The trap door had closed as soon as she fell but she could see a small hole in one of the walls of her prision, behind this hole she could feel the presence of a male, probably the kinectic mage that had controlled the trap door.

I wonder when and how they dug an elaborate system of underground traps around their perimeter and distributed kinectic mages using the damned red stones to detect our presence. It was just unlucky that a rat or other of our animal scouts didn`t spring one of these traps or they found a way to somehow sense the size of the animal above ground?

Anyway, our trapped sister soon started to listen to a chant coming from one of the walls. It was a priest of the crucified god, trying to free her of the demon possessing her so that she could become a nice obedient girl again. Nice, if a god really answered his prayers. As it were, only his own spiritual energy attacked the link between our sister and the Goddess. SHE didn`t even feel a thing, but was enraged by the presumptuous old fool and ordered us to solve this problem fast.

I decided to do what I was avoiding, an all out charge. Starting with three hundred lizard women as infantry, using shields full of kinetic stones bought recently in Thebes. While they advanced slowly, leaving our trenches silently under the cover of the rain, our sisters mounted horses and waited while our wolves got ready, crouching in the grass as far as the edges of the cleared area.

As expected, even in the rain and darkness, the knights rode to meet our attack. They were intercepted by twice their number in wolves, many of which were using armor of kinetic stones powerful enough to deflect some hits even from the knights` enchanted swords.

Then our sisters emerged from a hidden cave mounted in horses and shooting arrows at the archers in the walls. This would fail in any other circumstance, but the archers and mages on their walls were half blind by the rain while our archers could see their life signatures quite well.

While the battle in front of the first wall raged, our scouts, plus a group of shadow cats went over it and opened by force the entrance of one of the hidden tunnels. Our entrapped sister had sent tendrils probing the area and they found a weakness, in one of the walls of her cell. So, our scouts knew where to dig.

When the scouts got to their entrapped sister, the kinectic mage in the other room tried to collapse the ceiling on them, but this time, our own body mage, Melusine was with them, wearing kinectic armor. She broke the wall separating the cell from the mage and the priest and both were killed by two fast strokes of her two blades.

Melusine Erynier, as we call her, Melissa, Alysa, our best scouts together with Ania and Beitha, the two white cat girls followed the maze of corridors using mice to scout ahead and detect traps while they advanced and killed the kinectic mages hidden in the tunnels with speed and efficiency. While this very special group progressed underground, the others climbed back the earthen wall, and started to kill the archers posted there. They were met by the lizard women, that were used to escalate cave walls and saw little difficulty in climbing.

While we were taking the first wall, Melusine found that the hidden tunnels led to an entrance opening close to the log wall. They followed the wall, hidden in the shadows cast by the lanterns inside the city, until they got to the nearest mage tower. There, Melissa, Alysa, Ania and Beitha escalated fast and silently, throwing fire stones and smoke bombs inside the mage enclosure when they got to the top.

Fire stones do not work very well against fire mages, but heat, smoke and rain were more than enough to cover the movements of the much less subtle Melusine as she escalated the tower, destroyed one of the bars covering one of the windows and jumped among the mages. She easily decapitated two of them as soon as she was inside the enclosure, than she crouched low while the other girls threw darts and knifes at the remaining mages and, finally, finished them with fast perfectly coordinated movements of her two swords.

Now our archers left the horses and moved to the first wall, while pterodactyls braved the rain and, with difficulty, brought bows and heat stones attuned to transform heat into magic to our girls now occupying the mage tower. The mages in the other tower at that side of the village had now to divide themselves between shooting stones at the almost depleted shields of our lizardwomen, while they covered our archers and sending fireballs at the other tower. By now, though, there were only four remaining mages in this other tower. The last mages in the village, except for the two body mages guarding Urk, since all mages of the place had been moved to the towers as the fight progressed.

These last four mages fell one after the other as the girls shot from the other tower. At the end one of the kinectic mages even tried to crush the tower, but ironwood is to tough. Tough and difficult to burn, this is why the remains of Last Fall still stand nowadays.

Well, with the towers beaten, the archers on the walls went next. The remaining two hundred lizardwomen advanced in the space between the walls, avoiding the traps that had been marked by our scouts while the girls shot from one of the towers and our few mages went to the field, escalating the first wall to send fire balls at the second. Erynia killed more than a few archers with a well placed curse while I started to heal our wounded and to boost the speed and stamina of our warriors.

Finally, the second gate was opened by a group of lizardwomen. We stopped our advance a little then, while our archers moved to the second wall, one hundred lizardwomen formed a square at the opened gate and the other hundred took position to protect the archers in the walls. We formed a second wave, mounted one hundred mounted archers right behind the lizardwomen.

But I didn`t send our soldiers right into the city. The last knight had just fallen to the combined forces of wolves, raptors, pterodactyls and all other beasts of the land. They fell with bravery, killing dozens of creatures for each knight but were also stupid, if they had formed ranks inside the city, or reinforced the walls protecting the archers we might never be able to take the place. In other words, the boys decided to die heroic deaths charging madly in the dark and rain and we obliged them sending enemies that they could kill but would eventually overwhelm them with numbers.

As it were, we lost few women and only a third of our precious lizardwomen. We can replace a gigantic wolf in three years, a raptor in five, lizardwomen perhaps in fifteen while women take twenty or more years to raise and train notwithstanding the loss of a sentient being capable of adding so much to our little community.

I prayed to the creator for forgiveness, but I would not lose more fighters. We kept the archers on the walls, the lizardwomen reinforced by mounted archers near the opened gates but I sent the beasts inside. Mice, wolves, raptors, even dogs, hyenas, a few elephants, they went from house to house, killing everyone except those that got fast on their knees and surrendered. Following them went our scouts, to make sure that there were no traps, the place was clear and to herd the survivors among the townsfolk to the sensala.

One elephant destroyed the door of Urk`s mansion, and was killed by a body mage. Then I ordered mice to infest the mansion, avoiding any escape and the troops to move and steadily, slowly, travel the main road of the settlement. Finally, some of our sisters got into Urk`s home and started to ransack it, as if we didn`t know where he was hidden, while half of the lizardwomen went to help our scouts to escort the survivors out of the city.

Urk was hidden in a secret chamber, wearing a very expensive armor and with a body mage besides him. We knew where the place was since he had fought our mice to get there but we were not in a hurry. While we took the prisoners out of town, took all weapons from them, even kitchen knives, gave them a cart with food that could last three weeks if they were organized enough to divide it well and released them in the wilderness Urk was still hidden in his hole, listening to noise from above.

Finally Melusine broke the reinforced door and, before even the body mage could move, Erynia sent all our pain, all the suffering of the slaves, all power of all bad memories in our collective mind right to their spirit. The body mage died instantly, but Urk would not get so much mercy.

The despair kept coursing through his mind, paralyzing him as tendrils of our goddess surrounded his body and started to attack, slowly destroying his overpriced armor and his clothes, until he was naked and still in the darkness. Then the Goddess got into him and took from him every single memory, she could not control males and usually she was not fond of this kind of thing, but we needed the information and she filled him with pain until she got all she needed. Then he was allowed to die.

We destroyed all that we could of Last Fall, to the point of taking as many ironwood logs as we could carry to make new wagons to travel the grasslands in the future. Finally, we left the place and the grasslands, back to the safety of our caves to heal and build our own civilization.

This was fifty years ago. Now, this enhanced body of mine remains strong and fit, while the romanish empire shows signs of weakness due to internal infighting, our products reach all around the world and we number in thousands, filling this southern continent as far as the domain of the great dragon in the big valley where the weather is as cold as in the northern of the empire.

Along this time we received many women running from persecution, some hunted as witches, some just because they wanted freedom to marry anyone of their choosing. We even get a few couples, from time to time. Beautiful love histories in which the man prefer to be turned into a woman than to see his beloved suffer in the hands of a cruel fate.

But perhaps our most powerful achievement is yet to come. We will create an academy. Not for our children only, but for all that want to share knowledge.

But this is a tale for another time...

The mountains ring with HER joy, as Bastet and Erica raise a large family in the waterfall valley, Anora rules over a people like she was meant to do.
 

 
Somewhere, deep below the surface of the Earth:

The two lovers don`t need to talk, they don`t need eyes to see and they never are really apart.

And yet they keep their bodies together, they talk about all and everything and they have wondrous new light in their large workshop.

Erynia is content and Stephania happy for the first time in long years. They rule the underworld, the large caves full of new devices, fire and magic. Their pleasure comes both from the cold scientific discovery and from their undying love to each other.

But it is Anya that bring smiles to their faces when she visits.